Background: One of the goals of counseling in patients with chronic diseases including tuberculosis patients is to improve adherence to taking medication. By patient adherence, therapeutic results are more optimal. Additional counseling alternatives such as leaflets may be needed to make easier for patients to obtain information about their treatment. This study aimed to analyze the effectiveness of counseling with and without leaflets on the adherence on taking tuberculosis (TB) drugs.
Methods: This study was a quantitative research conducted using a quasi-experiment method with a control group for pre-test and post-test design. Data was taken by consecutive sampling. The number of samples in this study was 75 respondents which divided into three groups: counseling, counseling with leaflets, and control that is a usual care in hospital. The inclusion criteria were patients diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis with age 25-55 years, who has been taking TB medicines for at least one month and can communicate well. Data was analyzed using Wilcoxon and Kruskal-Wallis with post hoc Mann-Whitney due to abnormality of the distributed data.
Results: Before the intervention, of 20 respondents (42.6%) out of 75 respondents were obedient to their TB medicines, whereas after the intervention the number of obedient patients was 33 respondents (70.2%). There was a significant increase in adherence between before and after two weeks of counseling intervention with a p-value of 0.029 before and after two weeks of counseling with leaflets with a p-value of 0.003. Counseling and counseling with leaflets improved patients' adherence compare to control group with p-values of 0.028 and 0.001 respectively.
Conclusion: Counseling and counseling with leaflet impact in patients' adherence to tuberculosis medication.
Keywords: Adherence; Counseling; Leaflet; Tuberculosis.
Copyright © 2019 Tuberculosis Association of India. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.